All posts tagged Garage Update

About a year and a half ago, in 2012, I got an email from an editor at Good Housekeeping magazine asking about our garage that she’d seen on Houzz. Specifically, had it been published anywhere?

Nope, not yet.

So I took some fresh pictures and sent them too her. Then took some more, ………then a few more. It was hard to capture the same August lighting from the original pictures in a December photo shoot.

Eventually I was able to photograph something they could use.

They sent me a check, and were set to publish in June, then it was pushed to August, then September……then I just gave up. (I was starting to think that it was all just a plot to get me to buy a Good Housekeeping magazine every month. Which I was.)

The other day, I got an email from a reader who was a little irked that Good Housekeeping would just use a picture of our garage and not give us any credit.

What? What? What?

You mean they Actually used it in the June 2014 issue? I ran to the grocery store to buy one….or possibly 10, but who’s counting?

Check it out……below, or on the Good Housekeeping site, or even buy a copy of your own……

What a perfectly styled, well-organized garage. The kind that only exists in magazines. Right?

Well this one happens to exist on the other side of our kitchen door.

I love that there are even some resources to “Steal Our Style”.

As far as giving us credit……

Don’t worry, they did,

If you have a magnifying glass, and you pull the pages apart really wide, and if there isn’t too much binding glue in your copy……….you can see my first professional magazine photo credit.

It’s ourgarage, ………..but I think y’all knew that’s where I was heading.

Jen Jones manages a family of 5 (3 small boys mind you) and 2 seperate blogs. I Heart Organizing, detailing her super-human skills for keeping everything in it’s place, and Keeping Up With the Jonses, following her life and the 4 men in it with her.

So y’all will have to just bear through this post…….. and pretend it’s something Mind Blowing.

Here goes….

The door from the garage into the kitchen has been a thorn in our side for a few years now. It’s cheap, thin, someone cut it too short…..and when we open the refrigerator door it hits the doorknob. We’ve planned to replace it with something with a window, but until that happens we had to come up with a cheap solution to make it more attractive.

Just look at this “War Zone” we had to start with. (those light switches, BTW, used to be on the other side of the wall, BEHIND the refrigerator)

It certainly looks more impressive with the thick white trim around it. But something about those 2 different wood grains. The grain of the wall cedar and the grain of the door veneer just weren’t gelling for us.

Maybe if we paint it.

We had plenty of chalk board paint left from the chalk board globe we made a few months ago. So, “chalk board black” it is. (If you don’t know this, chalk board paint comes in a variety of colors. Don’t limit yourselves to just black like we did. Branch out a little, Try red, or green)

Jamie popped the door of its hinges, removed the knob, and frog taped the edges for a clean edge.

Adding casters seemed like the next obvious step because we will be moving this thing all over the garage.* The holes in the feet lined up perfectly with the mounting holes in some locking casters from the hardware store.

Just bolted them on with machine screws and nuts.

They raised the height just slightly, but now it’s a better “working height” for 2 big guys like us.

(sidenote – someday we would like to park an actual vehicle in the garage, so mobile fixturing is a must)

I gave the whole wood surface a good sand with a heavy grit sandpaper. Not so much to make it perfect, we left most of the paint for character, but to clean off the “gunky” build up and to prepare the wood to soak in all that mineral oil.

This mineral oil to be exact….Watco rejuvenating oil.

As far as I can tell, it’s just mineral oil. Simply wipe it on with a clean soft cloth and let it soak in. You can see right away what a difference it makes in the wood. It was pretty dry, so I used about half of the can.

Just Beautiful, isn’t it? and a great place to use those Tolix-like stools we just got.

….and 100 percent free.

(Well, technical, I did spend 30$ on casters…and 4$ on spray paint, and, I suppose, another 4$ for mineral oil…and possibly about 3$ on sandpaper)

Love what they do for us…but still hate seeing them on a daily basis. Hate them, hate them both.

One of the first projects we did after we moved in was wall over a useless hall closet and paper the wall in school classroom cork. There was a huge intake vent for the heater and a noise maker for the house alarm on the wall. I hated both of them as well, BUT…not so much after I painted them in latex paint I color-matched to the cork.

We shall call that paint color “Cork”.

Still had some. Quite a bit, actually. It doesn’t take very much.

So I thought, “What the Heck?”, cork has to be a close color to cedar. So I gave the ugly/necessary things a quick coat…..

See what a huge improvement that little can of leftover paint did?

You had to look real close to see them…Didn’t you?

Now, they are there….and not there at the same time. They blend right in to the cedar.

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We found a place to hoard, I mean store, more of our crap, I mean prized possessions.

Over the garage door, (but y’all already knew that from the title of the post).

Here’s the spot. Since our ceiling is 10 foot tall, there was plenty of room to install a couple of shelves (2 feet from the ceiling) and still leave plenty of clearance for the door to open.

Built us a couple of 2 foot by 8 foot frames out of 2X4s. And then mounted them with lag screws into the studs because we don’t want anything crashing down on our heads.

After completing the cedar planking around the frames, we added a platform of plywood. Plywood comes in 4X8 sheets so we just had the H-depot “half-Z” it.

Our shelves are the perfect size for 6 tubs of assorted importance.

Not quite sure about the view from underneath…..we haven’t decided if seeing the plywood bothers us. Probably not, it is just a garage after all.

That’s 12 tubs (count them) that are now tucked out of our way, mostly christmas decorations. I think this falls under the catagory of “Organized Hoarding”. L O V E a label maker.

Pay no attention to that white cord that runs along the ceiling (it used to be a brown one) that powers the garage door opener. We have plans to cover it with a “box” of some sort….still working on those details.

Just to make sure our new shelves are extra supported, we reinforced the corners with chain. Eye hooks in the ceiling studs are connected with a short distance of chain. The trick to this is the turnbuckle eye/hook. This small piece of genius tightens the distance between the shelf and the ceiling.

Yeppers! We are now even closer to a garage floor we can actually see…….and one day Paint.